Even After the Fyre, Festivals Still Aren’t Learning

It was supposed to be a unique music festival set in a stunning location. But when the scheduled dates arrived, the performers were abruptly canceled. Attendees complained on social media that campgrounds boasting luxury “glamping” accommodations were instead muddy and unsafe. In the aftermath, media coverage centered around a specific claim: the first-time organizers were woefully unprepared.

The description easily applies to this spring’s Fyre Festival, the Bahamas event so notoriously disastrous, the FBI got involved. But it also sums up what one newspaper headline hyperbolically described as the “carnage” at Y Not Festival, a four-day event in the English countryside this past July, which ended a day early amid heavy rain and claims of false advertising. Both events fit a disconcerting pattern.

The boom in music festivals over the past decade has led to increasingly homogenous lineups at the biggest ones. The smartmoney now is on smaller, more focused festivals that can attract dedicated audiences with a distinctive curatorial perspective. But fest popularity also seems to be attracting relative newcomers who sense a money-making opportunity—but whose ability to follow through ranges from questionable to non-existent. Fyre is only the highest-profile example. Look closer, and the ashes of flopped festivals are all around.

Y Not Festival, scheduled for July 27 to July 30 in bucolic Derbyshire, UK, was by all accounts a soggy experience—not uncommon at festivals, in theory. While Thursday’s lineup was not affected, Friday headliners—big-in-Britain rock blokes the Vaccines—had their set canceled due to hazardous conditions. Saturday’s performances by Stereophonics and Jake Bugg were reshuffled, and Sunday’s festivities were called off altogether, citing the potential risks. On August 4, Y Not issued a statement promising a 50 percent refund of ticket costs within two weeks (and a return next year). Two weeks later, dozens of unhappy fans said they were still waiting on those half-refunds. Update (11:51 a.m): A Y Not spokesperson told Pitchfork: “Everyone who bought a ticket and attended the festival has received a 50% refund because of the final day cancellation. We’ve heard from a small number of people who haven’t received their refund yet and we’re getting this fixed.” A fest rep recently said, “We were extremely well prepared for the festival this year.”

While Y Not isn’t strictly new—starting as an overgrown house party more than a decade ago—its management is. Y Not was taken over last October by a London-based company called Global, which bought its first stake in the festival business back in 2015. Another Global-produced event, Trucks Festival earlier in July, was also beset with complaints of inadequate preparation for the predictable UK-music-festival mud. Global previously faced calls for an investigation, after 200 people were stranded after flooding at one of its festivals in September 2016.

In North America, the most prominent festival dirt-flinging this year was over Pemberton Festival in Canada. Set for July 13 at a scenic locale near Vancouver, with a lineup including Chance the Rapper, Muse, and a Tribe Called Quest, the fest was canceled suddenly in May. Its organizers declared bankruptcy, so no refunds were offered. The festival was brought back in 2014 after an earlier version also flopped, but bankruptcy filings showed it lost money for three years and suffered a major sales decline this year. Marc Geiger, the head of music at the booking agency William Morris Endeavor, threatened a lawsuit at the time, saying, “The only difference between Pemberton and Fyre is that Pemberton sold their event with trees instead of supermodels.”

Pemberton’s contentious bankruptcy prompted concerns that it could damage the confidence fans have in music festivals. But like Fyre, it’s just one of the more visible examples of a dismayingly widespread phenomenon, as other festivals that lack a strong business model also throw in the towel with little notice.

In Pennsylvania, first-year festival Karoondinha was canceled less than a month before the July 21-23 event, boasting performers like Chance the Rapper, the Roots, Odesza, and John Legend. In northern Michigan, the EDM-oriented UpNorth Festival was canceled in its second year, only a week before its planned August 18 start. In Iowa, a new music festival called IowaStock, a Labor Day-weekend event that had promised an eyebrow-raising 200-plus acts across 10 stages and four days, was canceled with less than a month to go, citing unspecified health concerns on the part of the organizer. Now, I live in Iowa, and I’m friends with some of the scheduled performers, but even I didn’t know this fest was happening until some local journalists pointed out how it almost definitely wasn’t. (Not that the IowaStock website reflects that.)

Fyre-watchers have found a newfocus as of late. Earlier this month, organizers announced StarFest Music Festival, a “pop-up” festival scheduled for September 8 and 9 in Plano, Texas, with a shifting array of claimed headliners including Lil Wayne and Flo Rida. The fest’s founders have explicitly denied any similarity to a certain ill-fated island event. “With Fyre Festival, you had a group of guys with no contingency plan,” co-organizer David Taylor said in early August. “We know what we’re accomplishing.” But the festival has been hit with legal problems and has twice been forced to change venues. Of its current homelessness, StarFest’s website now reads: “This unfortunately may cause us to push back our event or move locations. More details to follow, but this Cinderella Story is not over yet! Stay tuned…” Indeed.

Fyre remains mired in multiple lawsuits as its founder, Billy McFarland, tries to negotiate a plea deal on federal wire-fraud charges. For the sake of festival attendees, a broader hope is that promoters with big ambitions will determine ahead of time if their plans are actually achievable. Launching a sustainable, large-scale music festival, as anyone who has done it can tell you, requires years of logistical hard work. At the very least, be prepared for rain.